In Lightroom’s Import dialog (and in the Library module), you are given the choice to convert your camera manufacturer-proprietary raw files into Adobe’s raw file format, DNG.
I have gone back and forth on recommending conversion to my students, and in my own workflow — not because I don’t trust Adobe’s conversion, but because I just have never seen it as mission-critical. While I could see some advantages, they just haven’t been that compelling to me, and converting to DNG does make the Import process take a lot longer. (At this point I do convert, but I don’t feel strongly about it.)
Though still not mission-critical, Lightroom 4 is introducing some new advantages, to make Lightroom performance faster with DNG’s than with proprietary raw files, and to allow lossy compression.
Here is a great article from C-Net: Adobe Offering New Reasons to Get DNG Religion, on what’s new, and on the advantages and shortcomings of DNG.
Do you convert now? Will you with Lightroom 4? Do comment with any thoughts.
(Updated 1/30/12) Soft proofing is new in the Develop module of Lightroom 4 (the Beta at this point). It allows you to get a better idea of what your photo will look like in print when printing with profiles, and what it will look like when you export to sRGB or another color space. If your photo has richly saturated colors, for example, when you soft-proof you will see them become muted, since many printers and papers, as well as sRGB, can’t display them so saturated. When you print to paper, your photos will also lose contrast, as paper whites are never as bright as monitor whites. Soft proofing allows you to preview this, and then if necessary, make further adjustments to your photo to optimize it given the constraints of your chosen output method.
